In recent years, there has been considerable interest in insect-inspired miniature robots. Through evolutionary processes, insects have prospered by adapting themselves to diverse environments. The number of species of insects is approximately one million, which comprises approximately two-thirds of all species of animals. By taking advantage of scaling effects, insects have acquired unique loc...

The performance of systems involving a body in a fluid flow can be enhanced by manipulation of the body shape through flow control. Active flow control, the focus of this work, is achieved by energizing low-momentum regions at the wall by tangential blowing using air. One mechanism for blowing air into this region is through synthetic jets. They are devices that push air out from a fixed orific...

The use of trademarks or names of manufacturers in this report is for accurate reporting and does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, of such products or manufacturers by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Summary The objective of this study was to assess the capabilities of a new piezoelectric actuator to alter the upper surface geometry of a su...

In acoustic energy, harvesting energy is captured from external noise sources, controlled and stored for various applications. Despite the prevalence of acoustic energy a major challenge of energy harvesting is the low power density. Acoustic Energy Harvester consists of a resonator, an acoustic transducer and a storage device. When acoustic resonator is excited by an incident wave at its reson...

This paper presents a time-multiplexed plasma-etching method for high numerical aperture paraboloidal micromirrors. By designing the appropriate opening and spacing of etching windows, one can fabricate micromirror arrays with varying focal lengths within one batch. INTRODUCTION Curved micromirrors, including various existing deformable micromirrors, e.g. [1-3], have many applications in micro-...

system to date has served all of the needs of wearable computing—light weight, minimum effort, high power generation, convenient power delivery, and good power regulation. We believe that our approach has the potential to solve these problems for a class of wearable devices by placing both the generator and powered electronics in a location where considerable energy is easily available, namely ...

Synthetic jet actuators are promising Active Flow Control (AFC) devices which could lead to saving millions of dollars in fuel consumption each year. The Bimorph piezoelectric actuators are an attractive alternative to other type of actuators as active diaphragms and are the focus of this work. Among the properties of a Bimorph actuator, a number of geometrical and physical external factors may...